Weekly Drops of Inspiration

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“Parents in the US cannot get rid of their kids. The share of young adults in their late 20s living with their parents is the highest it’s been in 75 years.

According to a recent study by the Pew Research Center, 33% of 25-29-year-olds lived with their parents or grandparents in 2016. This is almost three times as many as in 1970.

The share of young adults who don’t leave the nest has steadily increased in recent decades, and accelerated after the 2008 financial crisis. Across education levels, race, gender, and region, no group has been immune from the trend.

Pew’s researchers think late twenty-somethings are boomeranging back home because, in contrast to previous generations at this stage of their lives, they are less likely to have a well-paying job and less likely to be married. It turns out that no job and no partner makes living with your parents a lot more appealing.”

We all know how Snapchat is fighting to compete with Instagram and Facebook. Now, the most recent thing is their first TV commercial, in order to get new users.

The TVC that was released last weekend takes a minute to explain how Snapchat works and what functionalities it has, especially the ones related to AR. It’s clear by the tone of voice, the informative content and the people who appear on the commercial that they are looking for new users, older users.

One other interesting thing to mention is the way the position Snapchat – not as pure fun and refreshing platform, but “a camera, where how you feel is more important than how you look”.

Why it’s hot:
We are witnessing numerous attempts from Snapchat to stay relevant and this shows a more ” desperate” one. If people are living the app, if usage is decreasing, the only way to survive is to get new users.

The latest season of the series “Silicon Valley” aired this Sunday, March 23rd.
As a parody of the actual Silicon Valley, and the startup world, they are always making fun of everything related to the startup world.

The latest one was on this Sunday when they aired the first episode of the 5th season.
Taking advantage of the recent scandal involving Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, they added an easter egg to the series opening credits.

it’s very subtle. The Facebook logo is quickly replaced by ГДÇЭБФФЖ, a name composed by letters from the Russian alphabet. The fun thing about it is that ГДÇЭБФФЖ doesn’t mean Facebook in Russian. They just wrote it that way because of it kind of looks like Facebook and make it even easier for people to get the joke.

During the Silicon Valley opening credits, the Facebook logo flipped from English to Russian. First-rate burn by one of the best series on TV. pic.twitter.com/zvh9ZPd3td

Getty Images created a project to help demystify the negative perception that many people have towards homeless people.

The name of the project is “Repicturing Homeless” and it was made in partnership with FiftyFifty, a magazine that is sold by homeless people in…

The idea is simple. They made photoshoots with homeless people, putting them in the most searched scenarios like a business person or creative executive. The money they make with this pictures is going straight to the fifty-fifty magazine that supports the local homeless.

To drive attention to the project the pictures are in their gallery, mixed with their portfolio, but they a label that explains the project. They aim to make people look to people who live on streets differently, not with pity, but with humanity.

” We all know it’s a good idea to check the product reviews before buying something, whether it is a washing machine or a bottle of hair conditioner. Most people are used to seeing a 1-5 star rating next to inanimate objects, however, Oregon Zoo decided to put a twist on the usual format.

On Friday, they started celebrating the start of the weekend by posting humorous reviews of their animals as if they were ordered on Amazon. The lighthearted joke went viral instantly and other animal enthusiasts picked up the trend as well. Soon, zoos, aquariums, wildlife centers and even regular pet owners all over the world were sharing their own witty comments under the hashtag #rateaspecies. Scroll down to see what animals received five-star ratings and don’t forget to vote and comment on your favorites!”

Microsoft launched Soundscape, a new app that aims to help people who are visually impaired navigate better by giving them 3D cues.

They don’t want to replace guide dogs or canes but enrich people’s perception of their surroundings. A guide dog can’t tell you that there’s a Nike Store just around the corner. Using GPS and the built-in compass on the phone, the app can give people audio cues.

“Obstacle avoidance is not the problem, we have a dog, a cane and our blindness skills for that,” said Erin Lauridsen, Access Technology Director, LightHouse for the Blind.“The gap is knowing where things are and being able to decide what’s of interest.”

The app offers three possible actions: ‘locate’ tells you where you are, ‘around me’ calls out four points of interest around you and ‘ahead of me’ provides the names of five landmarks in front of you.

Why it’s hot:
It might not be a groundbreaking innovation and in terms of technology, it might not be the most advanced thing. But there’s nothing better than seeing technology been used to improve the quality of life of people.

We’ve seen a lot of innovations and technologies that are used to turn mail into a digital experience: QR code, AR, VR.

Bond is a company that is doing pretty much the opposite. They created a robot that has the ability to learn a person’s handwriting and replicate it, in order to help people and companies send a more “personal” mail.

How it works: they have an app where you pick from different types of cards and handwriting styles and where you can type your message. Then you just give the receiver address and they send the mail piece to you.

Although they offer a preselected range of handwriting types, they say you can also add your own – but it seems like a not very simple process.

“Apple’s HomePod is a great-sounding but ideologically flawed speaker, and it turns out there’s another major problem with the smart speaker aside from its lack of support for Spotify. Apparently the silicone base of the HomePod can damage wooden furniture, with multiple outlets (including Wirecutter and Pocket Lint) reporting that leaving the speaker on top of wooden surfaces can cause a white ring to form.

Apple has confirmed the issue to Wirecutter, stating that “the marks can improve over several days after the speaker is removed from the wood surface,” with the company also recommending that users “try cleaning the surface with the manufacturer’s suggested oiling method” if the white rings don’t fade. Given that HomePods aren’t meant to be put on a soft surface (the tweeters fire down, so putting it on cloth messes with the reflectivity of the sound), it’s not the sort of problem you can solve by just putting down a cloth underneath it, either.”

Everybody who uses Google Photos must have seen the videos they do automatically with your photos – usually based on a trip or special occasion. What you couldn’t do, until now, was tell Google Photos to create these movies on demand.

Starting this week, people can now create themed movies via the app or web on demand.

Google says it timed this launch around Valentine’s Day, but that’s only one of the options. You can also do movies with your cat or your dog, kids, selfies, and other preselected themes like: ” smiles of 2017″ or ” mother’s day”.

Why it’s hot:
This is one of those small things that you never talk about, but once you try it – it’s kind of fun. And it also gives you a different experience with your photos – we have so much of them in the cloud and most of the times we are not interacting with them.

“JPMorgan Chase and Berkshire Hathaway have joined forces with Amazon to form a new healthcare company for all U.S. employees. Right now details are so sparse there’s not even a name associated with the new company. However, this is big news for the industry, and it could possibly have ramifications not only for health insurance giants, but also smaller tech companies that are open to either partnering with the company — or even being acquired by it.

The decision didn’t come overnight. According to reports, the heads of each company — Jamie Dimon, Warren Buffet and Jeff Bezos — have chatted for years about how to fix the problem of high costs and a broken healthcare system.

‘The ballooning costs of healthcare act as a hungry tapeworm on the American economy,’ Buffet said in a statement out this morning. ‘We share the belief that putting our collective resources behind the country’s best talent can, in time, check the rise in health costs while concurrently enhancing patient satisfaction and outcomes.”

Why it’s hot:If the system is not working, you have to break the system – probably that’s what these companies and its leaders have in mind.

Die with me is the name of an app that opens a chatroom with random people when their batteries are running low ( 5% or bellow).

According to an article at The Verge ” It’s a place to bond, for a fleeting moment, with strangers sharing the same near-death phone experience, one with a built-in countdown timer on your conversations: what will you say in the moments before your screen goes black? “.

The creator said the idea came from a trip where they were lost in a strange city because they ran out of battery – they felt lost and fragile and started having philosophical conversations about that sentiment and how dependable we are on technology.

Why it’s hot:Personally, I think the idea is silly – why would I spare my last 5 moments with random people, to discuss the awfulness of being disconnected? It’s just weird.
But then, I realized two things:
1. A lot of weird things become big things, especially because it’s weird – can it be fun?Maybe?
2. Superbowl is almost a week from now, maybe this is a teaser for a campaign?

After a year of trying, a lab from the University of California that is led by the Australian Geneticist Van Eenennaam, had just used the gene-editing tool CRISPR to add a gene called SRY to some bovine skin cells.

What does it mean?

CRISPR: gene editing tool that enables scientist to make changes on the DNA in the embryo phase, so they can remove or edit bad genes or just make animals more profitable. It has been used to create pigs that are immune to viruses and sheep whose wool grows longer.

SRY: a bit of DNA that can make a female turn out to be essentially male—with bigger muscles, a penis, and testicles (but unable to make sperm).

It means that the industry will be able to have only male animals and in this case, male cattle – Van Eenennaam likes to call this the “ Boys only” project.

But, why would the industry take advantage of that? Basically, males grow bigger and faster, which means…more steak.

Why it’s hot:This is scary. Of course, we can discuss the positive effects that editing bad parts of DNA can have on animals and people. But do we need that? What are the risks of it? How can it change the way we live together?

Brands are always trying to find positionings that would essentially make our lives better:

Chocolate brands make you feel happier.

Car brands make you feel powerful or aggressive.

Technology brands make you feel connected.

Beauty brands make you feel better about yourself.

Spirit brands make you feel inspired.

But how does a raincoat brand should make you feel?

Stutterheim is a Swedish brand that makes rubbery and – like almost every Scandinavian brand – super stylish raincoats. Their products are beautiful, they have genderless collections, their stores are minimalistic and on top of that, their positioning is about embracing melancholy.

Why Melancholy? Because that’s the state of mind that we find our selves during a rainy day and since they come from Sweden, rain is part of their culture.

They could have created a singing-in-the-rain kind of positioning ( I bet It crossed everybody’s mind to go that way). But they decided to face melancholy and explore this mood across their communications, including their blog, where they interview artists from all over the world and explore the how melancholy is an important part of their creative process.

Why it’s hot?In a world that celebrates and dictates that we should all be happy, all the time – It’s bold to find a brand that feels comfortable about discussing a ” negative” emotion.

Sometimes as marketers we tend to refute bad things, make fun of our weakness and avoid discussing them with clients – but maybe this can be a good source of inspiration.

” CryptoKitties is one of the world’s first games to be built on blockchain technology—the same breakthrough that makes things like Bitcoin and Ethereum possible. Bitcoin and ether are cryptocurrencies but CryptoKitties are crypto-collectibles. You can buy, sell, or trade your CryptoKitty like it was a traditional collectible, secure in the knowledge that blockchain will track ownership securely.”

The game’s developers describe them as “breedable Beanie Babies” and each one of them has its own unique 256-bit genome. The kitties’ unique DNA can lead to four billion possible genetic variations.

Developers also say that these crypto-collectibles cats are gender-fluid, able to play the role of either the “dame” or the “sire” when bred together.

During AWS Reinvent Conference in Las Vegas, Amazon announced Alexa for Business Platform, along with a set of initial partners that have developed specific “skills” for business customers.

Their main goal seems to be aimed at making Alexa a key component to office workers:

– The first focus for Alexa for Business is the conference room. AWS is working with the likes of Polycom and other video and audio conferencing providers to enable this.

– Other partners are Microsoft ( to enable better support for its suite of productivity services) Concur (travel expenses) and Splunk ( big data generated by your technology infrastructure, security systems, and business applications), Capital One and Wework.

But that’s just what they are planning to offer and the new platform will also let companies build out their own skills and integrations.

Why It’s hot:

We are finally seeing those technologies give a step to being actually useful and mainstream.

Since Amazon wants to integrate Alexa to other platforms, It can be an interesting tool for future innovations.

” ‘Fake news’ and other misinformation, online propaganda, and satirical content people believe is true have filled the web via search engines and social media, and have caused a rift in how people perceive today’s news organizations and the quality of their coverage. A nonpartisan effort called The Trust Project is working to address this situation by helping online users distinguish between reliable journalism and promotional content or misinformation.

Today, a key part of that effort – called “Trust Indicators” – are going live on Facebook, offering easy-to-access, transparent information about a news organization’s ethics and practices.

Here’s how this will work in practice: starting today on Facebook, an icon will appear next to articles in the News Feed. When you click on this icon, you can read the information the publisher has shared related to their organization’s “ethics and other standards, the journalists’ backgrounds, and how they do their work,” according to an announcement from The Trust Project.”

” Facebook, Google, Bing and Twitter have all committed to displaying these indicators, though not all implementations are yet live.

[…]

Specifically, The Trust Project has released eight Trust Indicators created by leaders from over 75 news organizations that will offer additional transparency about an organization’s ethics and practices.”

Best Practices: What Are Your Standards?Who funds the news outlet? What is the outlet’s mission? Plus commitments to ethics, diverse voices, accuracy, making corrections and other standards.

Author Expertise: Who Reported This? Details about the journalist who wrote the story, including expertise and other stories they have worked on.

Type of Work: What Is This? Labels to distinguish opinion, analysis and advertiser (or sponsored) content from news reports.

Citations and References: For investigative or in-depth stories, greater access to the sources behind the facts and assertions.

Methods: Also for in-depth stories, information about why reporters chose to pursue a story and how they went about the process.

Locally Sourced? Lets people know when the story has local origin or expertise.

Diverse Voices: A newsroom’s efforts to bring in diverse perspectives.

Actionable Feedback: A newsroom’s efforts to engage the public’s help in setting coverage priorities, contributing to the reporting process, ensuring accuracy and other areas.

Why It’s hot:
We’ve all seen the effect that fake news can have.
We’ve been waiting for Facebook, Google an Twitter to do something about it as they are the media where fake news gains traction and visibility.
This is the first step and the good thing is that they are all in this together -and that’s a good start.

Uber e NASA just announced a partnership that intends to provide” flying car” rides to people living in big cities until the year of 2020.

While NASA is responsible for developing air traffic systems, Uber makes their UberAIR project become a reality.

The idea is to launch the beta service in Los Angeles, Dallas and Dubai and they are expecting it to cut by more than half the travel time.

Although this is not exactly a new thing, the difference now is that we know they intend to make that option affordable and that they are now officially part of NASA’s “Space Act Agreement”, which exists to develop security measurements to air traffic while assuring its efficiency.

Why it’s hot:
– It makes us think that those movie-like future predictions are actually happening.
– Air taxis can change the way we experience and live in big cities. For example. If it shortens the commute time, then maybe we can decrease the demographic density of big cities.

The Bewegtes Land is a project that started recently in Germany. Passengers traveling by train through Germany’s Saale Valley will have an unexpected treat, as the train route was transformed into a long stage for performance art.

The acting is performed by 400 residents (and volunteers) along the 19-mile train route. The vignettes showed various situations from “running” bushes to a shark emerging from a lake right beside a canoer. The goal of the project is to amuse passengers and, at the same time bring people from these small communities together.

The project was created by Jörn Hintzer and Jacob Hüfner, media artists, and professors at the Bauhaus University Weimar.

Why it’s hot:
They managed to create a new and creative media and a narrative fully designed for it.

This article from the economist talks about the effects that Face recognition can have in our society. As advertisers, we always imagine the good, cool stuff like giving out coupons, recommending something like a massage if you look stressed and so on. But there’s a dark side of it that makes the discussion not only about fun.

For example: a face recognition software has a rate of 80% success in discovering a person’s sexuality. Imagine how people can be exposed, specially in countries where homosexuality is illegal.

Why It’s hot:

It’s important for us to fully understand the impact of technologies: the good and not so good part of it.